Anti-Aliased line - If you draw a straight line (under an angle) using a paint program and you zoom in, you will discover that the line looks like a stairway.  To remove this and make the line look like a line points in different colors are added to the side of the line to make it look more like a real line.

[ Click on image for full bigger image ]

You eyes are actually being fooled by letting you think that it is a straight line without the stairway effect. FSAA comes at a price ... and this factor is performance. In higher resolutions the performance can drop with at least 50% of your framerate easily. At this time you should not expect miracles from FSAA. It works in all OpenGL games like Quake III, Soldier of Fortune, Half-Life etc. and hey, it surely does look cool. Recently there where some NVIDIA drivers that have leaked. The leaked drivers are now up-to version 5.30. They offer good performance and even Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing in Direct3D. However, the performance hit is huge.

We can demonstrate FSAA perfectly, please look at the image below. You'll notice a distinct difference between the two images. You can use your mouse pointer to move the lens and see what FSAA does in close-up.

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Another newbie in the v5.xx detonator driver (officialy called Detonator2) release was support for Texture Compression. After shaking hands and burying a cold war with S3 we instantly saw this cool method integrated in the new drivers. The large advantage from S3TC (S3 Texture Compression) is that more textures will fit into the videocards memory making textures bigger, higher quality which results in a clearer and sharper image.

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